Posts in category Warner’s Random Hacking Blog

For years I\'ve been batching up my new CDs to rip all at the same time. Sometimes, this means doing a couple a month. Other times, like this year, it means catching up with 12 months of backlog. And while my ripping habits likely are uninteresting to readers, what I\'ve learned over the years may be helpful.Years ago I (Read more...)

Today I saw that Office Depot had a DIR-615 on sale for $40.00. It was a new hardware revision: C1. I took a chance that it was a new non-Ubimax based router. I\'m glad I did, at least so far.The router is based around the Atheros AR9130 CPU. This is MIPS based, so there\'s a good chance that I\'ll (Read more...)

After I committed my previous set of CardBus fixes, reports came in about interrupt storms, first with 16-bit cards, and later with 32-bit cards. These have been corrected in my latest fixes. We always act the CSTS interrupt when we see it. In addition, I\'ve changed the acking of the 16-bit ExCA register to only happen when there\'s a \"R [...]

I just checked into the tree some CardBus fixes. The biggest change was to the power-up sequence, as well as transitioning to using filters for the card change events. These two changes are somewhat intertwined, unfortunately, since the latter exposed some holes in the former. In a nutshell, we now register a filter for the card status cha [...]

I\'ve spent a little bit of time implementing the start of board files for the arm port. The initial push has been for the at91 subport only, and many improvements could be made to this. I\'ve written up my initial thoughts on this on the FreeBSD wiki FreeBSD Arm Boards. It could use much improvement, I\'m sure.One idea (Read more...)

I was very fortunate enough to get a Casio Fiva MCP-205 given to me in 2000. I\'ve used this laptop for years. I built Mozilla on it once, and melted the frame around the LCD! This resulted in a new warning in the Mozilla build instructions. Since Casio is a Japanese company, and I got this as the result of (Read more...)

Rafal Jaworowski just committed support for a number of Marvell Processors. There are a number of commits going into the tree. He\'s just completed the first of these:Introduce low-level support for new Marvell core CPUs: 88FR131, 88FR571.From an earlier email message, we know that Rafal is working on support for Marvell 88F5182, 88F5281, 88F [...]

Oleksandr Tymoshenko posted a patch to gxemul that allows FreeBSD/mips to boot on it.I\'ve committed it to the gxemul port. So now if you have gxemul 0.4.6.5_1 or later, you can run FreeBSD/mips, the MALTA kernel. I\'ll post a howto and a pointer to a image in a few days.

Recently, I\'ve pushed many bug fixes from Alexander Motin to the SD/MMC stack. He\'s submitted a driver for the SD Assocaition\'s standard SD Host Controller, and fixed many of these minor issues as part of doing that. I\'ve tested these improvements on my AT91RM9200 system that boots off an SD card.There should be more support for MMC ca [...]

Here\'s an update in status to the FreeBSD/mips tree. David O\'Brien has been working through issues one at a time to get things building, primarily getting gcc support merged in. After learning from David that more patches were needed than were in my blog, I spent some time collapsing changes from p4 into the main tree. I\'ve updated my p [...]

The last week or so has show a spike up in FreeBSD embedded platform work. Fixes for mips and powerpc have gone into the tree. Support for a new ARM platform is getting ready to be committed. FreeBSD/mips is almost self-hosting in the svn tree (it has been in the p4 tree for some time). FreeBSD/powerpc and FreeBSD/arm continue to (Read m [...]

I\'ve had several requests for pictures of my son playing in the sandbox. I\'ll go one better and show pictures of my son and I playing in the sandbox. My wife took them just after I filled it with sand.Now, all I have to do is make a lid for the box to keep the local cats and racoons (Read more...)

I debated writing about this. After all, it isn\'t about hacking code. Instead, it is about hacking together a sandbox. It is about making stupid design choices and then over engineering \"solutions\" to those problems. It is a cautionary tale about doing the design right from the start and sometimes \"free\" lumber costs a lot in time an [...]

Tonight was low hanging fruit night. I went through all the PRs that had \"pccard\" or \"cardbus\" and committed the easiest of the fixes. When I did this with USB last year there were maybe 50 of them I committed over the course of a few weeks. For PC Card and CardBus, there were maybe 5 or 6 that I (Read more...)

As you may know, I\'m a user of the p4 side repository to do large code development. With the switch to svn, I wasn\'t sure I\'d still need to do that, so I let my trees there go for a while. It is clear to me that I\'ll need to use p4 a little while longer. So, I cleaned up (Read more...)

I have two cell phones. One of this is my iPhone, made by Apple and running Apple\'s version of FreeBSD. The other is the T-Mobile Dash. I usually use my iPhone, but this weekend I was using the Dash to see how well it worked. It was no better or worse than the iPhone in the one area that I\'d (Read more...)

Hans Petter Selasky submitted a bug against the rather poor error handling of device_get_children a while ago. When the usb4bsd stuff he\'s trying to get into the tree was posted for review, one of the issues was with device_get_children() as it related to device_delete_children().This reminded me of original issue. I\'ve gone through the t [...]

Just wanted to jot out a quick status update on FreeBSD/mips.A few weeks ago, diffs were sent out for review. The 6 patches are now down to three. gcc.diff, binutils.diff and pam.diff remain uncommitted.pam.diff (now pam3.diff) has been receiving feedback from DES and others and is getting close. The first iteration was really far away fro [...]

A few days ago, I wrote about the NSLU kernel config file being committed to FreeBSD\'s svn tree. The default compressed kernel is about 1.6MB, but the size of the partition of the NSLU2\'s flash is 1.25MB, a gap of just under 300kB. With some hacking, I\'ve been able to reduce the size of the kernel to fit.The default (Read more...)